Using Xamarin Live Reload with VMWare Fusion in offline land

One of the latest big improvement to the Xamarin.Forms ecosystem is Xamarin LiveReload. It’s the next step when you reach the limits of LivePlayer. It helps you quickly iterating during your UI developent.

Ian Vink wrote a blog post about how to use Xamarin Live Reload in a MacOS + VMWare Fusion + Visual Studio 2017 on a Windows 10 VM environment.

The major disadvantage of the described setup is: It doesn’t work without internet or setting up a local MQTT server.

That’s why I want to describe the setup I’ve chosen on my machine. On my development machine I use port forwarding from MacOS to my Windows 10 VM. Here is what you have to do, if you live in a country like me where fast internet isn’t available everywhere (Germany, not kidding!) or you are on a plane ✈️ or train 🚆.